MAstars 2007: Mark Emblem, MA Fine Art

MAstars 2007: Mark Emblem, MA Fine Art Mark Emblem, Five Easy Pieces, 2007, Video format with painted monitor, 96 minutes

Richard Higlett selects Mark Emblem from the Cardiff School of Art & Design for MAstars


Mark Emblem's current work explores his personal relationship with his creative practice and cinema.

While self defined as a painter, he feels a deeper empathy with film. Citing it as the dominant art form, he explores how this medium, informed by a fixed linear narrative, informs and contradicts his own practice.

A highly skilled artist, Emblem consistently works at deconstructing his own ability while questioning the view that painting is a flat and still medium.

He makes installations where films are projected via a restricting lens onto glass to sit compositionally alongside thick bands of solid colour and areas screened by bright coloured tape. In his degree show an installation featured Ridley Scott's, Thelma and Louise (1991) as a fluctuating and fluid element. The construction presents the viewer only with glimpses of the edge or periphery of the original footage. Here the film is unreadable and intangible, it is a place beyond narrative and where incidences of chance are allowed to exist. At the edges of the frame abstraction occurs and the opportunity for imaginative contemplation is realised.

In his two screen video piece 'Five Easy Pieces' Emblem incorporated a series of short performances of himself in the studio in various states of inactivity juxtaposed with the 1970's film of the title starring Jack Nicholson. The monitor screen has bands of coloured tape stuck to it that subvert the reading and intent of the original film, dislocating the actors from their imaginary space within the movie.

Along side this work Emblem paints onto postcards of paintings he admires, applying a single strip of colour that is resonant to the tonal essence of the original. These pieces, in their stillness, appear as coming from the opposite place to the use of film, while they also negotiate how we question the definitions and value of painting.

Selected by Richard Higlett
Published October, 2007

View Richard Higlett's profile >


Further information

richardhiglett.com
cardiff-school-of-art-and-design.org

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